A friend of presidents, industrialists, and statesmen… A sailor whose career began on coal fired steamships but went on to witness the surrender of Japan following the use of the first atomic bomb… A pilot who became the first man to fly over the North and South Poles, and an admiral who charted a landmass fully half the size of the United States itself… Admiral Richard E. Byrd was one of the world’s last great explorers.
In 1943 the Yorktown, Virginia, Naval Mine Depot manufactured explosive ordnance and loaded it onto ships in the York River bound for the battlefields of WWII. On November 16th, a massive explosion rocked the Depot, leaving enormous craters and shattering glass for miles around.
A ‘collective noun’ is a noun used to refer to a group of things as a whole–simple ones include a “group”, a “flock”, or a “pack”. The English language especially, however, has a tradition of whimsical, comical, or absurd names for specific groups of things.
In August of 1944 the allies were rushing to "cork the bottle" of the Falaise pocket. For the men of the First Polish Armored Division, Normandy was not merely a campaign to liberate France; it was a personal reckoning with the regime that had shattered their homeland.